Without a terrific demo, you will be just yet another musician lost in the sea of souls who thought that they could be a success. If you can nail a quality demo however, it will help you swim to shore and avoid being drowned under the waves of mediocrity. Ignore anyone who tells you that a demo must be expensive and glossy. Your demo does need to be clear and crisp, but recording studios are nowhere near as expensive as naysayers claim, so it will not be all that costly.
As your recording needs to be clear, get yourself down to a professional recording studio post haste. Don’t risk blowing your big chance due to a scratchy, barely audible recording. If you are really serious about being a professional musician, then you must record like one. A recording studio will have a sound engineer to tweak your tracks and a selection of instruments should you decide to do something different.
Too many bands and vocalists elect to record live, which entails an attempt to perform the whole track in one take. It is extremely difficult to achieve this, and even when you feel that you have created a great song that way, a listen to the recording will reveal amateurish mistakes that must be avoided. No musicians today will countenance anything other than multi-track recording. This allows you to record each instrument separate from one another as well as the lyrics, and it is exactly why serious musicians will choose a professional recording studio. If you want to get ahead, you need a clear sound, something that distinguishes you from the rest of the wannabes.
Once you have set up your equipment, you should go straight to the recording part. After it is completed, the sound engineer will mix it to a professional standard. You do not have to be overly concerned with getting complete perfection, (the engineer will get close anyway) as no record label expects a demo to be of the quality of one of their own releases.
Remember, you do not need to record more than a handful of tracks for a demo so don’t hesitate to use a recording studio. If you are well-prepared, it will be a swift process. Always put what your consider to be your finest work at the start of the demo. Finally, trust in the studio, these people are experts and have been helping musicians like you become stars for years. Most of all, enjoy the experience, hopefully there will be many more like it.